Recommendations by Anna Scantlebury

Free websites (which are useful):
www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk – for KS3/4, can’t be adapted but contain useful grammar exercises

www.teachitlanguages.co.uk – lots of great ideas and mostly free for an uneditable PDF version but nothing you can’t doctor for yourself with a snipping tool.

TES has some great resources but I, personally, do not pay for any of the resources.

I sometimes also use the resources on BBC Bitesize.

Apps

Duolingo is pretty good but it does get a bit repetitive and I’m not sure if you can skip to specific sections and bin those you’re not interested in.

Quizlet good for practise although you need to be careful – some if the resources are only as “good” as their author and it can be time consuming if you plan to make your own vocabulary sets. Some restrictions with the free version but if a school signs up for a license it can be used very effectively for whole class competitions/homework – kids earn points by completing activities which the teacher can check on, so can use that as an incentive ( or see who has done nothing in their free time)

I do like word search generators – frowned upon in some schools but have a place in language to help with reading/spelling and recall skills, especially if you only have pictures as clues.

Gianfranco Conti is a languages guru – not sure of age ranges but it’s based on using sentence builders which help pupils understand what the parts of a sentence are and the metacognitive approach really helps boost confidence, resilience , retention and reinvention. He has a Facebook page
“Global Innovative Language Teachers” which is for primary, secondary and tertiary teaching, he has several publications along with his co-author Steve Smith, eg Breaking the Sound Barrier, which is fantastic for listening activities – the most notoriously difficult and panic inducing language learning skill and The Language Teacher Toolkit which has lots of games and transactional language practise and is aimed at long-standing and new teachers with lots of ready to use activities and some sample lessons at the back. The files section of the GILT Facebook page are excellent.

They also have individual websites
Conti= language-gym.com
and gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com

Smith = frenchteacher.net and frenchteachernet.blogspot.com

Other Facebook pages:

New GCSE MFL

MFL Teachers Lounge

MFL resources and ideas.

May not be aimed directly at primary but you can’t really separate out languages like that – it’s either learn the Vocab and grammar needed to support different topics whatever your age or it’s just learning in isolation for learnings sake without any point to it. People should be able to adapt what they need for younger/weaker kids anyway.